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I hope you had a pleasant summer: mine was not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug towards seeking optimism: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.